Apocalypse Unborn (19 page)

Perhaps the stickies felt the same thing when they blew kisses to their intended victims, when they chased down defenseless prey, when they pulled it apart with their sucker hands. In their case, however, the primal urge was right there on the surface. Whoever or whatever had created the stickie race, human bioengineer or forked-tail devil, it had fanned that awful ember and made it all-consuming. A bonfire of chill lust. Stickies enjoyed no camaraderie. They had no villes, they farmed no land. They were a predatory swarm.

In all his past entertainments, Magus had created a mirror of the world, a funhouse mirror, rippled and distorted by contrived situations, by intricate slaughterhouse tableaux that laid bare the darkest secrets of the species that had spawned him.

Gassing people in a circus tent.

Mocking their terror with Mozart.

Staging combat to the death on a scrap of rock.

Mocking the fighters’ heroism and pain with the melodramatic strains of Wagner.

If the other recruits believed they would be all right once they wiped out the stickies and Wazls, they were in for an unpleasant surprise. From past experience with Steel Eyes, Ryan knew the stickies and Wazls were just the beginning.

As he saw it, there was only one hope for the companions’ survival. After fracturing the enemy point and dividing its column, they had to continue to drive their own spear through the stickie ranks, all the way to the cone’s double doors. If they could reach that gate and control it, they could stop the flow of mutie reinforcements and control the field of battle.

If they failed to reach those steel doors, he had little doubt that they were all going to die.

With that in mind, Ryan cut a six-foot-wide swathe through the mutie forces. After hammering the skull of a stickie with the pommel of his panga, he hurtled the unconscious body onto those coming up behind. Before they could get out from under the tangle of limbs, he was on them. As he stomped their pale necks, he caught a blur movement around the edge of the bowl, above the sea of bobbing heads and waving arms. Stickies were sprinting to the rear, trying to outflank the norms.

He shouted a warning, but his voice was lost in the clamor.

Ryan had to watch as the stickies pounced on the shoulders of the recruits, sucker fingers grabbing for the eyes, dragging them backward onto the ground, then ripping off their skin and muscles.

How many norms had they lost already? In the confusion of battle, it was impossible to tell.

How many stickies were left? The way they jumped around, there was no way to count them.

One thing was for sure—all the freshly spilled blood, and the promise of more to come, was making the muties go even wilder. Their frenzied counterattack forced Ryan to slow his advance or risk being cut off from the others. As the norm flanks buckled around them, the companions pulled together, fighting for their lives.

J.B.
JOGGED ACROSS THE DISH
in the three-spot behind Ryan and Mildred, on the left. The stickies who moved out of the one-eyed point man’s reach, who survived the slash of Mildred’s bayonet were his responsibility. Undeterred by their narrow escape from death, or perhaps energized by it, the muties lunged back into the fray with a vengeance, hands groping for the Armorer’s face. J.B. tomahawked them as he ran by, swinging only at the heads he knew he could hit squarely. His sizzling, backhanded ax blows sent the muties crashing face-first onto the rock.

As the companions thrust deeper into the column of stickies, backed by the sword-wielding, shouting islanders, the other recruits regained their courage. They pressed the attack on the momentarily distracted muties, hamstringing them with low chops of their knives and axes, clubbing them over the head with their hammers.

Stickies dropped like ten pins. While they twisted and thrashed, unable to get up, the islander sabers scythed necks, and the Cawdor juggernaut kept rolling forward.

J.B. knew where Ryan was heading, and he recognized the importance of speed in getting there. Like his old friend, the Armorer had acquired a handle on Magus’s modus operandi the hard way. From experience, he knew that what they were facing now was just prelude. There would be new beasts to fight soon enough, new beasts aplenty. Short of a complete turnabout, the wearing down of the norm forces was inevitable, as was their defeat. He knew there would eventually come a point when he wouldn’t be able to lift the tomahawk, let alone swing it with chilling force. Unless they could shut those double cone doors, permanently.

The window of opportunity for that was short.

Between the companions and the goal stood a savage, utterly fearless and unpredictable enemy.

With Ryan on point, the stickie column split and kept on splitting, like water under the bow of a streaking ship. Running in his wake, the companions moved forward so quickly that they couldn’t avoid stepping on bodies, alive and dead, and on parts of bodies, norm and mutie.

One of the badly wounded stickies jumped from the ground just as Krysty passed by. The redhead expertly dodged and deflected the attack across her body. As she did so, her long blade flicked in and out of the stickie’s side. J.B. saw the mutie was going to land to his right, inside the wedge, and too close for comfort.

Automatically, he switched the tomahawk to his right hand. He thought the stickie was probably dead meat, but he intended to give it a whack in passing just to make sure. When the stickie immediately sprang up, its mouth open, its needle teeth dripping, J.B. had already begun his compact, powerful downswing. Falling steel crunched through rising bone. J.B. skipped around the halo of backsplatter.

Although the expression in the black eyes did not change, the way the skull caved in, it was lights out. Permanently.

J.B. had only turned to the right for a second, but that was long enough for a poised, crouching enemy to find a clear lane of attack. Before he could completely turn back, a pale shape flew at him in a flat-out dive with arms outstretched.

J.B. couldn’t bring the tomahawk to bear across his body, so he squatted, making the attacker miss. The mutie dragged a hand as it flew over J.B.’s head, trying to snag hold of his face with its suckers. Moist fingers slammed into the side of his skull, then cool air hit sweaty hair. His head felt light. Fedora gone, his wire-rimmed glasses dangled off one earhook.

“Shit!” J.B. growled, glancing back over his shoulder.

The stickie had landed on its feet behind him. Clutching his treasured hat, it coiled to hurl itself on Jak’s unprotected back.

“Look out, Jak!” he cried.

Captain Eng was already on the case. In two long strides, he closed the distance. Swinging with both arms and putting considerable snap into the strike, the islander brought his blade down at a forty-five-degree angle, from right to left. With three hundred pounds of tattooed fury behind it, the saber’s heavy middle section sliced cleanly through the stickie’s eyes and eye sockets. Eng’s hip-pivoting follow-through took the sword all the way through the soft skull and out the base of the neck. Freed from the body beneath, the entire back of the bald head sloughed off. As it did, blood geysered up from the arteries that fed the brain pan. Stepping neatly around the mutie’s falling body, the captain snatched the fedora out of the dead hand.

Still running, the islander grinned down at his prize. For a second, J.B. thought he was going to try on the hat—a ridiculous prospect considering the size of his head. Then, with a snap of his wrist, Eng sailed the hat back to the Armorer, who caught it with one hand and screwed it back down on his head, swearing a blue streak.

The fucking thing had stickie on it.

The advance slowed as the norms reaped the rewards of mutie confusion. Their formation broken, the stickies found themselves surrounded. J.B. waged point blank war on the dead-eyed monsters, clubbing them to the ground with full power blows. As he brought his tomahawk down in a coup de grâce on an already mortally wounded stickie, he saw rapid movement at the fringes of the battle that was counter to the flow.

The flanking maneuver was perfectly timed and executed. The recruits facing J.B. were pulled down by dozens of pale hands. In the blur of flying bodies, in the screaming din, he saw men pinned to the ground and bitten, bald heads savagely shaking, needle teeth tearing out chunks.

Under the weight of the counterattack, the recruit gauntlet collapsed. In arm-waving droves, stickies broke through the holes they’d torn in the ranks. J.B. was forced to back up or be overrun. Cutting the tomahawk left and right, he kept the snarling muties at bay.

The Armorer sensed the companions were pulling in behind him, battle mates drawing together, shoulder to shoulder, for mutual defense. It was the last-stand formation. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw Jak’s flying white hair on his right and Mildred’s strong brown arms on his left. Their blades flashed dully in the weak daylight. Blood varnished the steel.

Overhead the Wazls dipped and dived, buffeting them with wing-wash and snatching at their heads with black tri-talons. The lizard birds knew the game was just about up.

J.B. could see the islanders had moved into a similar back-to-back fighting formation a short distance away. The huge men circled right to left, chanting their war chant, stomping their bare feet, their saber points out. They were a human-powered cutting machine. Anything that came within thirty-five inches fell to pieces and died.

Under any other circumstances the sight would have made the Armorer smile.

With an overhead chop, he cleaved a charging stickie’s shoulder, separating white bone socket from red flesh. It wasn’t a lethal blow by any means. After a split second pause, the attacker lunged at him with its good arm. J.B.’s second strike clipped the front of the mutie’s throat, sending it staggering to one side, trying in vain to keep its life blood from spurting out between its fingers.

Jak snap-kicked the gasping stickie in the side of the head, driving it to the ground, unconscious. Blood poured onto the rock in a sheet of red, the porous stone soaking it up like a sponge.

At that moment, the thundering music stopped.

And the scuffling, groaning, ringing, shrieking sounds of the battle that surrounded them became horribly clear.

J.B. knew what was coming. They all knew.

The grinding clamor, the brutal hand-to-hand stretched on and on, and still the dreaded noise they were waiting for, the signal for the beginning of the end, didn’t come. Magus was having his fun, making his victims wait.

When the double doors slammed back, the companions were nowhere near them.

In order to restrain himself from delivering a running commentary on the battle, Silam dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands and bit the tip of his tongue. Although the urge to point this out, and to jump up and down while doing it, was powerful, he knew better than to intrude on Magus’s enjoyment.

As always, when his fantasies unfolded in the flesh, Silam saw new connections and profound depths heretofore hidden. In his own savage choreography was the poetry of the spheres. The beauty of what he had wrought made him want to shout for joy. He saw the mindless hacking and hewing on the islet below as nothing less than the inescapable drama of all humankind, its hopes, its potential, its Achilles’ heel. Tragedy. Comedy. Futile strivings. Glorious aspirations. Heroism. Cowardice. It was pitifully, shabbily mundane, and at the same time noble, even spiritually uplifting.

Who else in Deathlands could have dreamed a nightmare so gravid with meaning? What other genius, artist, prophet of his caliber existed? Compared to him, they were all grubby parasites and posers, the sorry, self-poisoned Uncle Lesters of the world.

This time Silam had surely skinned back the fibrous husk, peeled away the scales of ignorance, revealing the squirt and squeal of life’s underlying mechanism. He looked upon that raw red truth as a father looking upon his newborn child.

With exaltation.

His eyes brimmed with tears at the wondrous potency of his talent.

At moments like this it didn’t matter to him whether Magus was amused or not, although from his tie-rod-throwing laughter, he clearly was.

As the opening act of the staged battle progressed, the horrid clanking noises became less frequent. The growing weight of his master’s silence smothered Silam’s understandable exuberance. And as he began to fret over the dire consequences of a failure to amuse, all the mystery and pageant of his creation seemed to slip away.

Because he hadn’t carefully read the program he’d signed, he had trouble remembering the precise order of battle. He couldn’t be expected to have every tiny detail at his fingertips. Of course he had a vague idea, but he had devised so many of these dance macabres that they had started to blur a bit in his memory. He relied on his ever-loyal Rish to keep the continuity straight and to remind him when he was treading familiar ground.

Silam’s heart began to pound as he took in the scope of the unfolding problem. Two of the Wazls, almost half of his air power, his command of the sky, had been hauled down in short order and promptly slaughtered on the edges of the fray. The stickie column was well on its way to dividing the recruit force until the wedge of norms crashed into them, spearpoint against spearpoint, with that one-eyed bastard Cawdor leading the charge. Silam watched in disbelief as the stickie formation melted into disarray.

Those damned islanders! he thought. Whose idea had it been to recruit them? Not his, surely. Had Rish or the fumbling Jaswinder somehow planted that bad seed in his head? For the life of him, he couldn’t recall. It was true that his sublime flights of fancy sometimes required serious revision. Silam knew he was not a practical thinker; no true artist was. His mind was a churning mass of ambition, jealousy, frustration, rage and fear, an engine constantly revving to redline.

A new noise echoed off the walls of the skybox, distracting him from the spectacle below.

If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought someone was sharpening a hoe with a rattail file. Silam recognized the sound, of course. Magus was grinding his teeth.

Steel Eyes had never shown impatience with a performance so early on.

It was natural in a life-and-death military drama for control of one side or the other to wax and wane. For a seemingly inevitable defeat—or victory—to suddenly reverse itself. Magus’s enjoyment depended in large part upon giving the intended victims the illusion that they had a chance, right up to the big finale when all hope was crushed. So why was Magus concerned already?

The answer was simple.

Ryan Cawdor.

The one-eyed man wasn’t just in charge of his own crew, he was leading the islanders into battle and in the process, wreaking devastation upon the stickies.

Because Silam hadn’t realized Cawdor was among the new recruits, he had failed to take his influence on the outcome into account. Generally speaking, the spin doctor tended to ignore past history if he hadn’t invented it. Now it was too late to work the back story into the drama, to devise something extra awful for Cawdor to endure. Something that would give his master the ultimate in payback, and put an end to lingering frustration and fury.

Ryan Cawdor was a fly in the ointment, a pebble in the boot.

He was significant because he was a spoiler.

Silam had never seen Magus frightened, and he didn’t appear frightened now. Safe in his high tower, protected by enforcers and uniforms, he had no reason to be concerned for his safety. Steel Eyes could have easily ordered the uniforms to land on the islet and slaughter the recruits. All he had to do was to turn off the music and give the command through the speakers for it to happen. But he didn’t want to cut his afternoon’s entertainment short unless it was absolutely necessary.

Silam had never before staged two bad performances in a single day. The consequences of such a lapse in quality made his blood run cold. This morning’s fiasco wasn’t his fault by any means, but he knew better than to make excuses to Magus.

Already the stickie losses were starting to mount up. From his high vantage point, Silam guessed about forty or fifty had been chilled. Losses on the norm side amounted to half that. Just the opposite of the morning’s disappointing show, Silam thought. Although he wanted to point that out to his master, he dug his nails deeper into his palms and kept silent. Magus screwed the world, his foreplay terrible to behold, but there was such a thing as putting up too good a fight.

Silam tried to remain calm. After all, the tide of battle wasn’t turning, he assured himself. It hadn’t even really begun, yet. The stickies and Wazls’ only purpose, he recalled, was to reduce the recruits’ numbers and break them into small, vulnerable groups. That done, the less mobile scalies and swampies would be released to take advantage of the surrounded and stationary norms. They would be followed by the smaller creatures that were triple-fast and triple-hard to chill, with the screamies doing the final mop-up.

Long before the first act had reached its scheduled climax, Magus did something he had never done before. He called down the curtain.

In a gear-box grinding growl he said, “Send in the clowns.”